After too many decades, almost a century, the people have pulled aside the curtain, and the man behind it has been exposed.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Factory Farms
Hey, I’d like to end them, too, but his solution–to go vegetarian–is not nutritionally viable to me. It would be in no way a dietary improvement.
It sure would be great if we could somehow manufacture meat without the suffering, though. It’s a technology that would be very useful for spaceflight.
Remaining U.S. Hospital Capacity
A hard look.
I’m unlikely to be killed by this thing, but I don’t want to even get it, let alone be hospitalized.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Why that doomsday scenario is likely way off.
[Bumped]
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
Bob Zimmerman doesn’t think that this will overwhelm our national hospital capacity. Though it does seem to be doing so in New York city.
Five Needed Paradigm Shifts
…revealed by the pandemic. The latter two are particularly important.
[Update a while later]
Related: A litany of useless laws have been exposed as well.
[Update a while more later]
The coming age of dispersion.
We’ve been wanting to get out of the city for a long time. Most people don’t realize how large and empty the American west is, including California itself. New technology is going to make it increasingly possible and affordable to live comfortably off the grid.
Turning Back The Clock
Rejuvenating cells by reprogramming them.
Faster, please.
Bad Regulations
Yes, the best response next time would be to shut down the CDC and FDA. Even Cuomo admitted that the regulations were slowing things down.
[Update a while later]
Stop panicking over bad data.
I won’t be surprised to find out when this is all over that the mortality rate was one in a thousand.
[Update a few minutes later]
Ford is making ventilators from seat fans.
#Murrica
[Update a while later]
Sorry, first link is fixed now.
The End Game?
Alex Azar describes the administration’s strategery.
NASA And The Coronavirus
How it is affecting the agency.
Bigelow
…has become a casualty of the virus (and perhaps overzealous government in Carson City).
Bigelow has had ups and downs for years, perhaps because of an incoherent business plan. He was expecting transportation to come along a lot sooner than it has, without doing anything to help it along other than promise demand.
Quarantine Lessons From Spaceflight
Meanwhile, we’re back home. As noted, we did drive up to Cambria (with the cats, which was…interesting — it was their first road trip, and Ember cried most of the way). It was relaxing up there, but a little weird, with all the restaurants being closed except for delivery or carry out, and most of the motels empty (we had a vacation rental across the street from the beach). We drove up to Ragged Point on Saturday (which was also closed except for gas and the general store), but no further into Big Sur, then perused the elephant seals on the way back to town. Not that many on the beach; it was just past mating season. A few week ago the beach at Piedras Blancas would have been full of them, fighting and fu**ing (I could have just written “mating,” but I liked the alliteration), and the mothers and pups trying to avoid being crushed by the bulls.
Did a three-mile hike Sunday on the bluffs above the ocean, and shot lots of pictures of breaching and fluking gray whales and their spouts as they migrated north. Very weird being up there on a weekend with so little traffic. I may post some, after we look at them to see how they came out.
Got back to Redondo Beach yesterday (the lack of heavy traffic on the 405 through Sepulveda Pass and West LA on a Monday afternoon was a little eerie), and now get to put the house back together after fumigation. The cats (who cried all the way back) are looking around and at each other like they’re wondering “Was that all some sort of weird dream?” Not infected, as far as we know (seems unlikely, considering that we were already hermits before this all started; it’s an introvert’s paradise).
[Update mid-morning]
One thing we saw up there that we never see in LA: Stars. We were across the street from the beach, and it was quite a dark neighborhood. Orion was very obvious, and I could easily see the Pleides naked eye. Milky Way wasn’t obvious, though.